As the paperbacks of their day, “limp parchment” bindings offer a path to discovering patterns in early-modern book production and consumption. Book historian Melissa Moreton is in the midst of an ambitious project to survey hundreds of these types of bindings.

A new collection of early 20th-century glass plate negatives and prints offers a portal to a now-lost Chicago: a city of smokestacks, water towers, and rickety scaffolding, bursting at the seams with commercial energy and vertical expansion.

Newberry staff pilot a new approach to organizing the library’s enormous collection of road maps and travel ephemera, applying archival methods that could eventually scale up to make 230,000 items more accessible to researchers.